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16 August 2017

Cassini’s final five

NASA’s Cassini spacecraft has started the first of its final five orbits around Saturn before it crashes into the planet on 15 September. On 14 August, the spacecraft dipped lower into the atmosphere than ever before, forcing the thrusters to fire to maintain stability and allowing researchers to figure out the density of the top of Saturn’s haze.

Cardiac weight risk

You can’t be “fat but fit”. An analysis of more than half a million people in Europe found that even when overweight people have healthy blood pressure, cholesterol and blood sugar levels, they are still 26 per cent more likely to develop coronary heart disease (European Heart Journal, doi.org/cbs9).

Game on

Artificial intelligence beat professional video gamers at the Dota 2 championships in Seattle last Friday. Elon Musk’s OpenAI developed the bot, and although it can only at present play a restricted version of Dota 2, the game is still considerably more complex than others AI has mastered.

Care home demand

The average woman now requires three years of substantial care in old age and the average man 2.4 years, according to an analysis of 15,000 adults in England. The study predicts that by 2025, the nation will need an extra 71,000 care home places (The Lancet, DOI: 10.1016/S0140-6736(17)31575-1).

Dino mystery

A strange dinosaur may be the “missing link” between two great dinosaur groups. Chilesaurus resembles a Velociraptor-like meat eater, but a new analysis suggests it is an Ornithischian, the group that includes Stegosaurus and Triceratops (Biology Letters, DOI: 10.1098/rsbl.2017.0220). It may reveal how the two groups diverged.